Husk: A Maresman Tale (23 page)

“So,” Jeb said, “what’s this about, if not best of three?”

A frown crossed Sweet’s face, but then he got what Jeb was talking about and chuckled. The effect softened his demeanor, and suddenly he didn’t seem so ornery, so jealous.

“Women,” Sweet said, shaking his head. “Bring out the worst in me.”

“Me too,” said Jeb, though he guessed it was a different kind of bad.

“My pa was the same,” Sweet said. He looked away as if remembering, chewed on his lip and then winced. “Got me good there,” he said, gingerly touching the swelling with his fingertips.

Jeb spread his hands. “Well?”

“Well,” Sweet said. “She being a husk and all—Maisie…” He spoke her name as if chewing on gristle. “Thought you might still be looking for her.”

“She’s gone,” Jeb said. “Left town.” At least he hoped so. Shog only knew what he was going to do if she’d decided to stick around.

“Still here,” Sweet said. “She passed by Tizzy Graybank’s. I was grabbing a coffee, you know, to start the day, when I felt my skin crawl. I looked round, and there she was hurrying on by.”

“She see you?”

Sweet shook his head. “Don’t think so. I downed my drink and followed her. Don’t know why I did it, given what she is, what happened…”

“Where’d she go?”

“The wagon square,” Sweet said. “Looked to me she was planning on leaving, only that friend of yours was waiting for her—the one that fixed me up.” He slipped a finger underneath his jaw bandage and scratched.

“Fixed you… You mean—”

“The Wayist.”

“Marlec,” Jeb said. “What the shog?” What was Marlec up to? Hadn’t he learned his lesson from the last time he’d tried speaking with her? What did he think…? And then he realized:

All that bullshit about me being the instrument of her salvation! Is that surrender to your god’s will, or are you just looking out for yourself like the rest of us?

He’d touched a nerve, exposed the monk for what he was.

“How long?” Jeb said, standing so fast his chair toppled over backwards.

Sweet shrugged. “Maybe an hour. Last I saw, they was sitting side by side on a bench, and he was reading a book to her. Big leather book, you know, like all them Wayists—”

“Stupid shogger,” Jeb said. “Davy!” The lad was his best means of finding this square quickly.

The wench chose that moment to return with a plate of eggs and sausages, and Davy may just as well have been deaf.

“Leave the boy to his grub,” Sweet said. “I can take you there.”

Jeb grunted that he’d heard. “Davy,” he said again, “anyone comes to town looking for me, you let me know right away and there’ll be coin for you.”

Davy looked up with egg spilling from his mouth and half a sausage in his hand.

“Enough coin for a dozen meals like that,” Jeb added.

Davy nodded and got back on with his eating.

Jeb sighed and turned back to Sweet. With his leg ruined after the fight, the big man would be too slow. “Just point me in the right direction, then go for help.”

“What help?” Sweet said. “The sheriff?”

“If you can find him.” Chances of that were slim to none. “Failing that, any help you can rustle up. Marlec’s in danger, and I don’t think I can stop her by myself.”

Sweet nodded and stood at the same time. “Come on, then.” He led the way outside, lunging with one leg, scraping the other behind him.

Barlow was on the porch smoking a weedstick, hands thrust deep in his pockets. “Brainless meatball,” he muttered, and somehow managed to spit around the stub of his weedstick.

“Least my pa weren’t a dwarf shagger,” Sweet said without stopping.

“That’s a shogging lie, and you know it,” Barlow said. “Weren’t no dwarves on the surface afore I was born.”

“Cockroach like your pa probably ran into one when he crawled down some dark crack in the shithouse. Just thank shog he didn’t stick his maggot some place worse, like a homunculus, or a bleeding boreworm. Rumor is, he weren’t exactly fussy.”

“Why you shogging piece of… I’ll have you, Sweet, you hear that. I’ll shogging kill you.”

Sweet chuckled as he gave Jeb directions, then limped off toward the sheriff’s office. Shog only knew what he’d find inside, but then Jeb remembered: it was locked, and he still had the keys.

25

W
HEN JEB REACHED
the wagon square, he was out of breath. He bent over and clutched his side, gasping. It didn’t sound right to him, how the air whistled going in and out of his lungs. When was the last time he’d run so fast? When had he needed to? He’d grown so dependent on Tubal, he’d gotten complacent. A man in his line of work needed to be able to run. It was a weakness he couldn’t afford, and one he planned to remedy once this was over.

The square was a paved mosaic depicting a boat hauling in a dragnet full of fish. It was flanked by two-story townhouses of the kind you saw in New Jerusalem, not in a dump like Portis. Likely, the owners were from the city. Just as likely, the mosaic was their contribution to the culture of Portis. New Jerusalem was rife with such pretensions from the most ancient times on Earth: the kilted militia in their crested galeas, the white togas of the senators, the fluted pillars, and the statues of muscle-bound nudity on virtually every street corner. Least that’s the way it had seemed on Jeb’s last visit.

Wagons were parked in a loose circle about a pond. Ripples of sunlight rolled across the surface, and in the center, streams of water arced from the upturned hands of a bronze mermaid.

Three of the wagons were going nowhere. One had no wheels, another’s front axle was snapped in the middle, and the third was having a new wheel fitted by a couple of swarthy men.

The fourth wagon, though, looked set to leave. The driver was leaning out from his seat, talking to a man in a white toga on the ground. Surely it wasn’t a senator, here of all places. Jeb took a few deep breaths and strode across the square, calling out to them.

The driver made a visor of his hands and squinted. The man in the toga turned and rolled his eyes.

“She’s leaving, Mr. Skayne, and there’s nothing you can do to change her mind,” Sendal Slythe said.

“Marlec,” Jeb said, not bothering to ask what Slythe was doing all dressed up like he was still in office. “Where’s Marlec?”

“Is that—?” a woman’s voice came from inside the wagon. The canopy was pulled back, and Dame Consilia poked her head out. “Oh, it is.”

Her platinum hair was a towering cone, bedizened with different colored beads that sparkled in the suns’ rays. From the neck down, her sumptuous figure was hugged by a blue satin dress that barely reached her knees. It rode up on one side, revealing a perfectly toned thigh. Her lower legs were crisscrossed with the black leather straps of her sandals.

Jeb gasped. Mostly because it wasn’t Maisie; partly because her dress was cunningly slit in several places, allowing him a glimpse of skin beneath; and partly because she looked like nothing so much as a high-class whore.

Her face was a study in feigned indifference, but he could tell by the rise and fall of her breasts she wasn’t unaffected by his closeness.

Slythe stepped up to Jeb like he was berating an underling. “Dame Consilia has graciously accepted a business proposition, isn’t that right, my dear?”

Jeb doubted she had much choice in the matter, given he’d lost all her money.

Now it was her turn to roll her eyes, and she let out a sharp sigh.

“Contacts in Brink, you see.” Slythe tapped the side of his nose. “Contacts everywhere, as a matter of fact.” He tugged down his toga, as if to remind Jeb he’d once been a senator.

Pointedly turning his back on Jeb, Slythe climbed up beside the driver. “Shall we?” he said, and the driver snapped the reins.

Dame Consilia stumbled as the wagon lurched into motion. Jeb wanted to say something, but his brain was befuddled. He caught her eye as the wagon pulled out from the island and headed toward the road.

“Wait,” Jeb called out. He thrust a hand in his coat pocket, fished out Tharn’s money purse. The least he could do was pay her back for her losses at the seven-card game.

The driver slowed but didn’t stop. Jeb had to run to keep up. He held out the purse to Dame Consilia, and she eyed it with disdain.

“For you,” Jeb said. He tried to explain, but he started to wheeze and cough.

Her eyes narrowed as she said, “You think me a whore?” Then they widened, and she snatched the purse from him. “How dare you!”

She ducked back inside, and Slythe urged the driver to keep going.

Jeb took a few more leaden steps then stood there with hands on hips, sucking in shallow snatches of air. For the first time he could remember, he felt regret, wished he’d treated her better. It was the dress, he told himself. The flash of thigh. She truly was exquisite. But deep down, he knew it was more than that. Something in him had changed—was changing. He’d first felt it upon seeing Maisie. Was it his mother, he wondered, confronting him with what he was, holding a mirror up to a life that fell far beneath the standards a man was supposed to live by? Showing him he was less than human?

He looked on as the wagon reached the road and disappeared from view. It was like watching his future drain away down the gutter. With an effort of will, he pulled his mind back to the task in hand. Marlec was in danger. Maybe he couldn’t put things right with Dame Consilia, but he could at least—

A boot scuffed the ground behind him. Jeb turned as a shadow fell over him—right into the path of a fist…

26

A
FIERCE LIGHT
scorched behind Jeb’s eyelids. He would have pulled his hat down, but he wasn’t wearing it. Shog knows what he’d do if he lost it. It was a gift from General Coltraine’s wife, and he’d not found quality like that anywhere in Malkuth.

He groaned and tried to twist away from the glare, but heavy hands held his head in place. His instinct was to lash out, but rope cut into his wrists. When he opened his eyes a slit, white brilliance burned them, and he shut them tight again, for all the good it did.

He could feel the hard back of a chair digging into his shoulder blades. His arms were trussed behind him, and his ankles were bound to chair legs. His heart began to gallop, and he opened his mouth to cry out, but someone shoved a wad of cloth in it, then proceeded to gag him. He choked and moaned, threw his weight from side to side, trying to tip the chair. A heavy slap to the face set his head spinning, and then suddenly the light went out.

It grew deathly quiet. Besides the rush of blood in his ears, the thumping of his heart, all he could hear was the whining buzz of a mosquito. Just the thought of it latching on to him, drinking his blood, was enough to make him squirm. He hated mosquitoes. Always had. Malfen’s overflowing gutters were a breeding ground for them, and he’d lost count of the number of people he’d known who’d died from some gnat-carried disease. Made him think of his mother: what she was, what she did. Made him think of what he was, too, beneath his thin veneer of humanity.

Someone breathed beside his ear and then chuckled. It was as if they’d been holding their breath.

“Quiet,” a cold voice said—Bones the taxidermist. “You’ll wake the baby.”

“Too late.”—It was Clovis from behind. “He’s already awake.”

Jeb recoiled from the scrape and flare of a match being struck. Amid the stench of sulfur, a softer, warmer light blossomed into being.

From in front, he heard the rasp of metal on stone, over and over.

Jeb blinked his eyes into focus on Bones studiously sharpening a scalpel.

So, Boss had made his move. Had to owe it to him, it hadn’t taken him long to figure out Jeb had escaped; unless they’d just stumbled across him at the square by luck.

He craned his neck to look behind.

Clovis was watching him with glazed eyes, a thin line of drool glistening in the flickering light of the lantern he was holding. In his other hand, he held a metal wand. When he saw Jeb looking, he pressed his thumb to it and the white brilliance returned. He grinned like an idiot, pressed it again, and it died.

What was it, magic? Or was it like the flintlock, some artifact from Earth’s distant past?

“See, I told you he was awake.” Clovis slipped the wand in his pocket. “Wouldn’t hurt for once if you believed me.”

“I was being ironic,” Bones said.

A look of annoyance came over Clovis’s face, and for an instant his eyes grew clear as crystal and sharp as knives. “Me too.”

“Well,” Bones said, testing the edge of his scalpel with his finger and smiling with grim satisfaction at the red line it left, “that’s all right, then.”

“Any way you look at it,” Clovis said.

“Any way.” Bones took the scalpel between his teeth and cracked his knuckles. As he stepped toward Jeb, the lantern light carved his features up into deep shadow. Another step, and his face was a hair’s breadth away. There was nothing fierce about his expression, no hint of a threat. He narrowed his eyes as he slid the scalpel from his teeth and used it to prod gently at various points on Jeb’s forehead, cheeks, and throat.

Out of focus behind Bones, Jeb could make out the blurry heads of animals mounted on the wall, and beneath them, a pair of turkeys like the ones the stygian had eaten, stuffed and seemingly watching him. There was a hog in mid-run mounted on a wooden plinth, and a massive bear rearing up on its hind legs.

Wherever they were, it was big—a basement, judging by the lack of windows and the stale air. Must have run the whole length and breadth of the building above.

Bones caught him looking and took a step back, half-turning to take in the room. “Glad you like it. My workshop. Where I get most of my work done.”

“You should be honored,” Clovis said, pressing down on Jeb’s shoulder with a meaty hand. In the orange glow of the lantern held in his other hand, his face took on a demonic cast, and his eyes seemed to burn with frenzy. “Hardly anyone gets to come down here.”

“And those that do,” Bones added for him, “tend to stay.” He lunged at Jeb and turned the chair around, its legs scraping on the stone floor.

Jeb’s eyes widened, and he almost swallowed the rag in his mouth.